I recently launched a new site for a client called www.Joliemama.com - a website filled with articles and tips on Parenting Teen Girls. Most of the work was completed in 3 weeks. I creating a custom theme from a .pdf supplied by the graphics designer and also created 2 custom forms. I also used CSS to style the Forum. Here is an overview of the modules I used to build the site. Many of them were recommended by various members of the Drupal community. Your help was much appreciated.

Unique features of the site – Overview

1. Home page – using custom teasers made with Views
Client asked for 5 main articles to show up in the home page with image and teaser. So we did this using Views and CSS. When you click on one of the 5 main articles, the 4 most recent articles in that section will show up as teasers in the footer block. This required some custom PHP code in the blocks section to get this to work. A big thank you to Steve Liu. Some have asked if I used panels to setup the home page. But panels were not needed. Only Views.

2. Custom Sign up Form
- We used Content Profile module to extend the default "register for an account" page.
- This way we could add fields for name, address, phone number, sign up for newsletter and opt in for special offers from the site and also from partners.
- The client requested to download this info in CSV format.
- So we installed Views Bonus Pack. Steve helped me out and set up a View and then all the data can be downloaded in CSV format.

Theming the custom register form was also challenging. I needed to add this purple border around the content header and also around the page content. I used CSS to do this, but it also added a border to every form in the admin panel.

Steve helped me out by adding a custom class to the page.tpl file using custom PHP code. Next time I will make a copy of the page.tpl file and name it page-register.tpl and put the custom code in there. I believe this is called best practices for Drupal.

3. Custom Contact Form and new Promo form
- We used Webform to create this form. It has Download by CSV format included.
- Needed to add custom class to page.tpl in order to put the aqua coloured border around the header and the body of the form.

4. Advanced Forum
- The custom asked for a forum so we used the Advanced Forum module. There are 4 or 5 skins that come with this forum and it was not very difficult to modify the CSS to get the desired look. We used the built-in Forum blocks for the blocks on the right hand side. We didn’t want the ads to show up in the forums so we blocked them using the block settings. Don’t show on forum/* and comments/* pages.

5. FCKeditor is a rich-text editor that needs several helper modules including:
- imce
- imce_wysiwyg
- IMCE Wysiwyg Api Bridge

I really like the Paste from Word option. The client sent me 4 pages of book titles and authors where each book title is a link. Fortunately, Paste from Word also copied all the links. It was amazing. I completed that section in a very short time.

One problem with this editor is that it sometimes adds a bunch of spaces. So it can be tedious to clean up the HTML code. I heard there was an option to add spacing to the HTML code. If someone would let me know what it is that would be much appreciated.

I wrote a detailed step by step tutorial on how to set and configure the FCKeditor. I will post it soon here on mydrupal.ca blog.

6. SEO modules
- Page Title
- Nodewords
- xml sitemap
- Google analytics
Visit www.seodrupal.org for detailed instructions on how to add SEO to your website.

7. Service Links
We added a Social Media menu to the bottom of each article

8. Better Messages
When you submit the custom forms, the error messages were messing up my page. So I used Better Messages module. It enables the error messages to pop up in little boxes so it doesn’t mess up the custom CSS layout.

9. Better Formats
This module allows you to set up certain Input Formats to show up for certain roles. This is very helpful.

7. Google CSE – Custom Search Engine
This handy litte module integrates Google’s Custom Search into your website. It enables the user to search the site using Google and also to search the Web. In the Web search part we blocked 6 of their competitor website. Steve did some custom work to do that.

Notes: I used Acquia bundle of modules to start with. See www.acquia.com
Used the Basic theme as a framework to build the custom theme. This is available on drupal.org. See www.drupal.org/project/basic
Mollom is a great module for preventing spam but it doesn't work with forms. So I added the Captcha module for that. We also used Backup and Migrate module so the client can make frequent backups of the site content.

Any questions? Comments? Feel free to post them below:

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